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Thursday, February 05, 2009

Zemanta : free blogging assistant

Zemanta has suggestions while you write inside your blogging dashboard! It tries
to understand your text and recommends images, related links, tags and
more.
I am using Blogger to write my posts and setting up the Zemanta Firefoxplugin was pretty easy.
When having the Blogger dashboard open it presents a special window next to the concept post.
The content of the post is being scanned and at least 5 things are happening automatically:

based on semantic search it offers to add links to parts of the text. I see many Wikipedia suggestions. I wonder if I can direct this anymore, i.e. with telling it to insert my Delicious links.

it presents suggestions for Tags & Labels. They can be included with one click. I do not see an option to add extra labels.

Pictures are shown the should relate to the text. They come from either from the web searched via an filter or from your own stuff from Flickr.

Your own stuff can be entered in the Preferences. With a max of 160 feeds via OPML or blogs can be added. This content is scanned to offer recent articles you bookmarked or others pulished in feeds you subscribe to. A simple click adds your selection to a special box "Related Articles" at the bottom of your post.

the Preferences also offer to add a button called "Reblog" or "Zemified". It's an easy way to offer readers to re-write your post for publishing or sharing.